Automation of organizational activities poses a tremendous challenge in that routine tasks associated with a particular service or product involve complex interactions between technology resources and human resources. Although communications technologies have assisted with increasing productivity, such technologies, traditionally, have been deployed in an ad hoc manner, resulting in inefficiencies with respect to resource utilization. Therefore, workflow management systems have been deployed; however, these systems constitute a significant investment above other infrastructure costs.
There is presently no simple, cost-effective way for a user to determine the precise point in a multi-step workflow process. Traditionally, workflow management tools require users to parse through workflow status logs in order to determine the process history and the current status of the workflow. To address this, users can install client software on their desktops; unfortunately, these software packages are vendor-specific and implementation-dependent. Furthermore, different workflow management products require installation of different software packages to view a particular workflow process.
Based on the foregoing, there is a clear need for approaches that enable a user to quickly and efficiently access information about a workflow process, avoiding manually intensive tasks and reliance on vendor-specific/implementation-dependent software packages.